The Mexican Embassy in the United States sent out an urgent memo to all the consulates, instructing them to “minimize the impact” of the November 20th protests taking place in the US in solidarity with Ayotzinapa. The story they are selling us is this: the federal government is fighting crime and “making great progress” towards justice. No need to rise up like people are doing all over Mexico; stay calm and return to “normal”.

They want to pacify us and keep us obedient. They want us to believe in their myth of “law and order”. They are afraid.

President Obama is getting ready to announce “administrative relief” for immigrants, the latest show in a long farce that criminalizes and kills migrants in the name of “national security”. The message is this: you should be grateful, we are giving you some crumbs. No need to rise up and organize, stay calm and return to normal.

They want to pacify us and keep us obedient. They want us to believe in their myth of “democracy”. They are afraid.

The United Sates and Mexico are enforcing a social peace that is a social death. This social peace is now called the “War on Drugs”. The US is the patron of this war, and the Mexican state is its accomplice. This is not about fighting the narcos – it is a way to govern through death, disappearance and terror, to govern not in the interests of people but in the interests of capital.

In the name of “fighting crime”, the state and its borders are machines of war. It is a war against indigenous peoples and campesin@s, a war against the poor and against those who reject the rule of the market. More than 30,000 people have been disappeared in Mexico since the US-imposed War on Drugs began in 2005. This war is not just against the students from Ayotzinapa, but against the consciousness they represent. The state disappears those who arm themselves in self-defense against the narcos and government occupation. The state disappears the Yaquis who fight in defense of ancestral waters and the right to exist. The state disappears those defending the lands from resource extraction, those who refuse to acquiesce to their own destruction. The state disappears the women it has displaced to the maquilas. The state disappears all who stand in the way of the neoliberal restructuring of life, those who create autonomy and threaten the interests of multinational corporations. The state disappears migrants across journeys of terror, from Central America to the US Borderlands. The state disappears red, black and brown peoples into prisons, into borders, into graveyards, into the living death of servitude and assimilation. The state disappears us into silence and obedience.

In the killings and disappearances, the state is the author and executor at the service of capital.

All across Mexico, people are rising up against the terror of the state and the corporate interests it represents. Solidarity means rising up with them!